Tag Archives: Parenting

Laura Marquis is back at Raise A Mother – and this time, she’s contemplating a question that looms in many, many parents’ minds. Laura lives in St. Augustine, Florida with her husband Jeremy, her son Will, her daughter Caroline, and her dog, Lucy. She works part time and enjoys reading, painting, writing, swimming, and pilates.

My best friend just had a baby, and my youngest just turned two. This is a classic formula for baby fever, I know, but I have been debating a third child since my daughter was a week old. She is hearty, feisty, and beautiful, and I remember thinking to myself during one of her loudly demanded nursing sessions that she would be a perfect middle child, because from day one she has been one who will not be overlooked.

Like this:

We’re on the way home from the store. R, at seventeen months, is adamant that he can pull a wagon full of groceries by himself, and stubbornly asserts his independence with loud growls whenever we try to assist him, even though he simply doesn’t have the strength for this task to be smooth or anywhere close to efficient. A, at three, is getting cranky just ahead of lunch time, and is behaving as such – there’s a good deal of whining and impatience when our full attention is not his, and he can’t seem to decide whether he wants to race us down the sidewalk or be carried. I can hear the strain in my husband’s voice as he cajoles R to stay on the sidewalk with his heavy load, and the sharpness rising in my own as I tell A to stop cutting me off and nearly tripping me as an effort to win the newest race he hasn’t told me we’re having.

I feel so defeated in moments like these. It seems we can be going along, having a great time as a family, gathering produce in the store, talking to fellow passerby on the street, laughing and talking about things we see, my partner and I marvelling at our lovely kiddos, and then, suddenly, it’s like a switch is flipped. We’re abrupt, impatient, and short. Where once we saw charm and adorableness, we now feel irritation and helplessness to just fucking get a move on already.

Well, I came across a new trick this particular morning, and it’s so simple, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I picked Arlo up out of frustration, but as soon as I started carrying him, I started thinking of him as someone else’s kid. Not a stranger, but a tiny person I know and love who just isn’t… well, mine. I imagined how differently I would react to his whining, his incessant attention-seeking, and his fatigue if he were my little nephew, or my friend’s daughter, or any of the other littles I’ve welcomed into my home on numerous playdates, and whom I love interacting with.

Suddenly, I had more patience for my own sons, when I realized I would treat my friends’ children differently in the same situation. I kept trying to view my boys in this light for the rest of that day, whenever I felt myself getting irked with them. And it WORKED. I didn’t capitulate to whining, or change my decisions, but I was somehow more patient, a little softer, and more resourceful in seeing things from their perspective and offering distraction, instead of just feeling like I had to put my foot DOWN because it’s time to do WHAT I SAID, DAMMIT!

In some ways, the fact that this trick works really bothers me. Shouldn’t I be MORE patient, kind, and loving with my own children than with anyone else?? I love them more than I thought possible, so shouldn’t my behaviour reflect that?? There’s a little twinge of mom-guilt there, that presumes I have to pretend my kids are someone else’s in order for me to be on my ‘good behaviour’ with them… and that feels rather shitty.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just a normal sign that we are really becoming solidified as a family – kids included. It seems pretty common for human beings to ‘let themselves go’ with those they are closest to, to allow only their very inner circle to witness their moments of weakness, their cracks and flaws, and rely on their goodwill and unconditional love to help fill those cracks in again when they’ve broken. I’m not saying this is a good dynamic to be in with my kids, but maybe my ‘lesser’ behaviour, my moments of weakness and crankiness and sharpness, stem from feeling close to them, rather than not loving them enough.

Wherever it comes from, though, I’m just happy I’ve found something that can help jump-start me out of a grump with my kiddos, ’cause those funks can be really tough to get out of. I want to be a good mom to them more than I want most things in life, so even if it takes pretending from time to time that they’re not mine, I’ll do it. I just won’t let them know that’s the reason 😉

This morning, one of my mom friends sent me a little internet story called, A Clown Shares What Face Painting Taught Her About Male Violence in an Alarming Twitter Thread. It’s super short, so click on it if you want the full story. The gist is that when the clown was face painting at a party, a mother stepped in to stop her four-year-old son from getting the adornment he requested on his cheek (a blue butterfly) and insisted the face painter instead decorate him with something “for boys” (he ended up with a skull and crossbones).

…

Yep.

…

I felt anger bubbling up as I read this story, and tears welling as I thought of this little boy, walking around with a symbol of violence and death on his cheek, confronted with the idea that this is what he should present to the world, rather than the beauty and transformation he hoped to present.

Shannon and I created this blog as a place of non-judgment, as a village where its members and visitors treat fellow mothers and parents with grace, giving the benefit of the doubt that we are all just doing our best, that we all want the same good things for our kids – love, acceptance, and for them to grow up being a decent human being.

But guys, I’m really struggling to maintain this sense toward this mother.

I want to step in and paint a hundred blue butterflies on that boy’s cheek, if that’s what he wants.

I can easily come up with the relativistic, supportive things I could say in reaction to this story: I’m hearing this second-hand from the face painter… who knows what else that mother was going through that day… maybe she wasn’t at her best self… maybe she regrets it and won’t ever do it again… we all make mistakes… maybe she really thinks she is protecting her son from being made fun of…

But honestly, I’m mad at this mother (or, at least, at the version of her presented to me). I wholeheartedly disagree with her decision to step in and control her son’s self-expression to keep him in line with stereotypical masculinity. If this incident is truly indicative of her behaviour with her son, then frankly I think she’s fucking up the possibilities for who he could be, and contributing to a terrible system that tries to limit every single person in a binary prison of bullshit.

This is hard for me to admit on this blog. I’m supposed to be leading the safe space for non-judgment. How do I reconcile these two things?

I want to trust that she’s doing her best, and at the same time, I want to shake her by the shoulders and say, “How could you?!”

I want to respect her way of doing things as a fellow parent, and at the same time, I want to step in and paint a hundred blue butterflies on that boy’s cheek, if that’s what he wants.

I want to give her the benefit of the doubt and reassure her that we all make mistakes, but I also feel so strongly this is not an innocent mistake, and that it’s one she can’t afford to make too many times without causing lasting damage.

Help! I need some insight from my village…

Can I reconcile non-judgment and anger? Or are there, eventually, just lines in the sand that we have to choose or risk having no principles at all?

Let me set the scene: a mother sits on the couch, sobbing while she holds her screaming baby for what seems like hour number 74, even though it’s only 2pm. Amidst her crying there’s “I’m so sorry”, “Oh my God, go to sleep!”, “Why are you so cute?” and “I love you so much”. It’s a normal day and it’s completely insane.

Sound familiar? I’m pretty sure this has been every parent at some point in the first year of their child’s life, (or at least that’s what I’m telling myself these days). This has definitely been me. It was me yesterday…and the day before.

Yes, this is where I’m at these days, mamas. Serving at the whims of an adorable little tyrant who WILL. NOT. SLEEP. I consider myself a fairly patient person, but this test is next level. Continue reading →

Recently, my partner and I got into a spat. It seemed to rise out of nowhere, was emotionally intense for about five minutes, and then ended up being almost laughably frustrating because, at the core, we struggled to identify what exactly was the sticking point of the argument. When we stepped back, it seemed we were perhaps mainly griping out of habit, based on particularly trivial triggers. (I take great comfort in the fact that the longer we are together – and it’s been a loooong time – the fewer, farther apart, and shorter our arguments seem to get for the most part.) This particular disagreement got me thinking about the stories I tell myself about my partner, the assumptions I make about him, and the way I treat him accordingly.

When partnerships last for a long time, we really get to know each other, and it’s easy for us to think we have our partner “figured out”: we know what they do, why they do it, and how it fits predictably into the well-worn pattern of our relationship (“I knew it!” “You always…” “You’re just saying that because…” Insert-your-own-key-phrase-here). I think this dynamic of assumptions is likely true of most long-term relationships, whether they involve friends, lovers, or family.

Parenting my two young children gives me a different experience of being in a relationship with another person. Instead of taking this same approach, I find myself allowing a great deal of breathing room to just watch them develop, and I’m more generous in my assumptions about why they may or may not be doing what they’re doing or not doing. I can be enormously patient (not all the time, but I can be) with my kids because I acknowledge that they are simply not ‘done’ yet. They are working so hard to master new skills, dealing with high emotional reactions, trying to communicate and not having the vocabulary to articulate all they would like, getting overstimulated by much of the world around them, and learning a bajillion new things every day. I accept that life is likely overwhelming to them, and I try to support them through this experience – to share in their joys, notice their efforts, and empathize with them when it’s hard. And it feels like a no-brainer that I do these things – after all, I love them fiercely.

…Which begs the question – don’t I also love my partner fiercely?

When we’ve been with someone for so long, it can be easy to take for granted their familiarity, our own knowledge of them. The way I approach and interact with my children is, in one way, so much slower, requiring so much more patience and energy on my part. I have to pay attention. I have to read the cues and behaviour they display now, and hear the words and beliefs about the world they express now, not what they displayed or said six months or two years ago. I have to be constantly attuned to their development as people – their changing capabilities, stressors, desires, and viewpoints. That is what it means for me to connect with them as individuals.

Yet I don’t always extend this same attention to my partner, my beloved, the one I’m committed to loving through thick and thin. I don’t necessarily allow the same grace and breathing room for his development, though I certainly would like to have this from him, when I think about it. After all, I’ve changed a lot over the years, re-assessing my priorities, values, and understandings of the world, myself, and my relationships. I hope that my partner and others in my life can allow me the space to continue to develop as a person, instead of assuming I’m stuck in whatever ways they found me when we met.

Yet in those conflicts, quite often, it seems we don’t deal with each other as we are now – it’s far too easy to let our assumptions of what we think we know about this partner of ours dictate how we react to them. It’s easy to cast each other in the same roles we played in the early days of our relationship, though likely they don’t fit so well anymore. It’s easy to project the values, opinions, and behaviours of years gone by onto the tensions of today, but it doesn’t provide much opportunity to acknowledge growth.

Of all the things parenting tiny people has taught me about myself, a major lesson is that I don’t know it all. I don’t always know where the life path is leading, the best way to get to a goal, or the true desires of those closest to me. Yet despite this lesson, I still sometimes fall victim to the ignorance of thinking I have my partner completely figured out.

Perhaps we need to more often treat one another like we treat our children – with that kindness and that acceptance of being a “work in progress”. Because we most certainly are works in progress, every one of us. And if we can love each other as such, hopefully we can model the kind of love we want our children to find throughout their lives, too.

Like this:

Much is made of the negative sides of the internet and smartphones in the parenting world. Mothers of previous generations have consistently told me they do not at all envy us younger women when it comes to figuring out how to do this parenting gig. They look at all the information that we have available to us on the web, and surmise that it’s no wonder we are so stressed about getting things”right.” They express gratitude that all they had to deal with was the sometimes conflicting advice of their immediate circle of family and friends, as well as a few parenting books, instead of the opinions of the global population of the interwebs. They shake their heads at the high expectations arising alongside social media imagery that tells us we can, and therefore should, be able to attain perfection as mother, crafter, party-thrower, cook, housekeeper, organizer, and professional.

But I’d like to throw my own head shake, along with some hefty kudos, back to my foremothers today. Because for all the bad rap that technology gets for its dominance over our lives, it is also sometimes my savior of a day.

Kudos to the moms who did this without cell phones. What did you do when you were, as I assume everybody has been since the invention of clocks, running really late with an infant to meet a friend who also had a baby? Did they just wait around forever, or did you finally show up at your agreed-upon place only to discover your friend had, quite reasonably, left an hour before? (I refuse to believe that you were just always on time.)

Kudos to the moms who did this without Netflix or podcasts. Being able to tune into an episode of One Bad Mother, or binge-watch West Wing or The Crown, have been key to my sanity while in a stretch of waking up at 5 a.m. every morning with a tiny baby who thinks that’s an appropriate time to start the day. I think I would have gone crazy if I was left with only the entertainment TV and radio stations deemed fit for air at that hour.

Most importantly, kudos to the moms who did this without having friends in a little box in their back pocket. I don’t know what I would do without having my friends accessible at the touch of a button, even in the midst of winter when none of us want to go out of the house, even while a little one is too sick and we don’t want to risk passing the germs around, even in the middle of the night when I’ve felt frustrated and ineffectual. Many instances of loneliness and self-doubt have been alleviated by an encouraging text, a humourous retort to my baby’s inconvenient behaviour, a photo that confirms no one else really has it all together either, or even just a string of messages with content that doesn’t seem in the least bit important. On some days, those “insignificant” conversations have been essential for keeping this mom grounded in the world outside her house.

I love knowing what these women get up to during 3am wakings

I know, I know, if we lived in a time before these technologies, we would be able to do without them as well. But this is neither here nor there. Today, I want to give kudos to my heroines of the past, who did all we do, and sometimes a hell of a lot more, without these little electronic boxes that connect me to my village.

Happy Valentine’s Day, mamas! I hope you’re all enjoying a day filled with love from your little ones and maybe even a bit of grown-up love time.

In our house, we have officially reached the baby-could-come-anytime countdown. And like pretty much every Mom I know, I am simultaneously completely ready to be done with pregnancy and frantically trying to accomplish as much as possible before the little nugget arrives and I am newborn-bound. Given that this will be my second maternity leave, I also find myself reflecting on my hopes and expectations for what lies ahead.

I should start by saying that I am extremely fortunate. Living in Canada means that I am entitled to a full year off with the baby, and with my workplace benefits, I can afford to do that. This will allow me time and space to truly step away from work and focus my attention on my little one and my family. I know very well that this is not something everyone in North America enjoys, and I am grateful.

At the same time, I know from my experience with my last maternity leave that so much time away from the routine of work and adult time can be deeply isolating. And for someone like me – who thrives on checking off to-do lists – the need to feel like you’re getting things done can be hard to fulfill when your day is largely dictated by a tiny human who gives exactly zero fucks what’s on your list for that day.

Still, I’d like to think that the fact that this isn’t my first baby rodeo will help me have more reasonable expectations and provide perspective and comfort on those tougher days. With that in mind, I’ve got three goals for this upcoming year at home:

Accept that some things are just not going to get done, but recognize that lots of things are getting done: The last time I went on maternity leave, I had a big list of things I thought I would get done in my “year off” – things like mastering recipes for lemon meringue pie and hollandaise sauce, and finally painting a three-panel seascape for our living room. Seriously.

In retrospect, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. It will shock precisely no one who has ever met a baby that none of these things even got started, let alone finished. But there were lots of other things that did get done – organizing and cleaning projects that made our daily lives as new parents easier, a scrapbook of my son’s first year. And, of course, there was all the growing and developing that my son did over that time, which is pretty remarkable when you think about it. In other words, the stuff that was more important to our family got done.

So this time around, I’m going to try to be kinder to myself and to have faith that while sometimes it may seem as though nothing is getting checked off the list, in the grand scheme of things the important stuff will get accomplished. I may still have no clue how to make hollandaise sauce, but my kiddos will be fed and cared for, so we’ll call that a win.

Get out of the house and into the village: The last time I was on maternity leave, it took me months to feel confident enough to leave the house alone with the baby for any trip longer than the five-minute walk from my house to the local coffee shop and then promptly home. We went lots of places with my husband or other family, but when alone I was petrified that my son would have a meltdown in whatever public place and I wouldn’t be able to handle it by myself. Last time I was on maternity leave, I was also the only one of my friends with a small baby. Linds was home with little A, but she lives six hours away, so our commiserating was mainly over the phone. My not very big house started to feel teeny tiny, let me tell you.

Two days in particular helped me gain a bit of perspective. The first was five months in, when Linds came to visit for a week with A. We took the bus together to the mall to do some Christmas shopping…for most of the day. And you know what? Everyone was fine. The boys were mostly content, but when they got fussy, we knew how to deal. It was exactly the proof I needed that I could hack this mom thing, not just in the safety of my house but out in the world.

The second day was nine months in (yes, nine), the first day that I spent mostly away from my son. All that time focused on the needs of my beautiful little baby hadn’t included enough focus on taking care of myself and I was melting down. My husband saw me melting and, fortunately, took matters into his own hands. He called my mother-in-law, who was more than happy to take my son off my hands the next day while my husband was at work. I don’t even remember what I did with that day. I just remember realizing how very much I had needed that break and how important it is to embrace the village around you.

So, this time around, I want to remember the lessons from those two days. I want to get out of the house more from the start, confident in the knowledge that I am perfectly capable of navigating baby needs in public. And, at the same time, I want to remember that it is more than ok to ask for help. It is necessary. No one can do this parenting thing truly alone, and taking care of yourself is essential to being able to take care of your kids. This time around, I am also fortunate to have a few friends who are home with their little ones too, and I plan to take full advantage. After all, there’s no one who understands what you’re going through as a mom better than other mamas.

Enjoy: Initially, I was going to write “enjoy every moment”, but let’s be real. Some moments…they’re not going to be so great and I’m not going to enjoy them. Some moments are going to royally suck. That’s ok. There are lots of moments that will more than make up for those times that make me want to scream into a pillow.

And having done this before, I know full well that when this year comes to an end, I’m going to wish I had more time at home with my little nugget.